Wavelet Audio Cabal 8 - Opinions?

[ediblepolecat]

Hey everyone,

Been a lurker on here for a few years now having been mostly on VI Control but feel there's more breadth and diversity over here.

As the subject would suggest, I'm eyeing up Wavelet Audio's Cabal 8 for my guitar needs but for some reason I'm a little hesitant.

I have Shreddage 2 which I still use (I CANNOT get on with the Shreddage 3 engine at all) but want a little shake up in my guitar tracks.

My hesitance for Cabal 8 comes from the fact that there's not much out there in terms of user experience. Next to no reviews, no YouTube vids (other than the company ones) and nothing really on the forums. I'm not fully trusting of the stuff put out by Wavelet Audio as I'm sure there was a sh*t tonne of post production work to make it the best they can put out.

TLDR - does anyone have this and if so, what are your thoughts?

All the best

[claw11]

Would like to see some user experiences as well. Also the version with just clean DI is too expensive to buy on faith alone. I think their implementation of pitch wheel based legato looks interesting. I'm mostly worried how some goold old powerchord riffing would sound as the demos and videos are almost exclusively single note stuff.

[Off topic rant }
Btw, At one point I thought I was alone in thinking that ISW made a horrible mistake with Shreddage 3 engine, but I've seen enough similar experiences on this very forum to know I'm nowhere near alone with this haha. They just made it so much harder to do basic heavy riffing and have it sound good which was why the original vision resonated so well with customers back then. With Shreddage 3 engine it's just so cumbersome to make stuff quickly and have it sound as good (not even better, just as good) as with shreddage 2. Palm muting is bonked with how they work with velocity layers if you don't use keyswitches to switch into palm mutes etc.

It's the reason why I can't get too excited for their upcoming 8-string guitar because I know it will use the horrible Shreddage 3 engine. Well, I should say horrible to make basic quick chugga chuggas. For other stuff it works fine.

[ediblepolecat]

I'm with you on the new engine, I've never been one for key switches (which is why I love S2 so much) but I've been in touch with their support and apparently the snapshots have settings matching S2 mapping using the velocity method so I'll try that and see where it gets me.
FYI it's in the drop down under Styles>Metal Rhythm

As for Cabal 8 I'm probably going to buy it this weekend. Nik Nocturnal has a video showing him using it and it looks promising. Sounds pretty decent for the low riffs (the lead stuff is a little synthetic but could be useful for the music I write).

I'll post back soon.

[claw11]

I was very interested in Cabal 8 but didnt buy it for the same reason as you stated: lack of...anything on the internet. If you do end up buying it, do share your impressions!

[ediblepolecat]

Update - just downloaded Cabal 8.

First impressions are somewhat mixed.
Shotgunning is an issue but can be avoided with some surgical velocity tweaking...just.
The sound is pretty good in fairness but, again, you'll have to tweak the eq and get a decent amp sim.
Avoid buying the elements bundle, you'll be pissed off and feeling cheated out of your cash. The DI NKI is the only real option here.

I'll have more of a play with it later so will update then. Gonna see how it sits in a mix. I have a feeling this will be more suitable as an addition to another guitar vi (S2 for example) rather than being the front and centre guitar vi.

Hope this helps, will update soon.

[ediblepolecat]

*shotgunning? *Machine gunning!*

[claw11]

You know, your comments so far reflect the feeling I got from the limited material I've seen of the product. The thing that didn't quite impress me in the videos was the palm muted sound. It sounded a bit thin compared to the gnarly chunky ones you can get with Shreddage 2. Maybe Cabal 8 is more suited for progressive metal (djenty stuff) where it's not so much about trash metal style riffaging?

Anyway, another product to keep an eye out for that I just learned about is Ample Sound's newest guitar library they demoed in NAMM2020. It's a 9-string guitar geared for heavy stuff lol. Ample sound is very good sounding in their other products so you know I'll keep an eye out. I think they mentioned maybe releasing in february, but I suspect we'll get news soon enough. Thank you for your reporting so far!

[ediblepolecat]

You're right, Cabal 8 doesn't like repetitive riffs or power chords really.
For Djenty style riffs it's actually a pretty solid VI (needs a decent amount of eq'ing and compression though).

I've been using AME for a little while now and was always bummed out that I couldn't tune it down so I'll look out for the 9-string!
If you're interested I'll post a link to a track on YT where I used Cabal 8.

All the best

[claw11]

Yeah I didn't pull the trigger on AME because it would only go down to C, but the actual sampling seemed very good from the videos I saw so I can't wait to see how their low tuned stuff sounds. Man I just hope for some chunky ass palm mutes. That's really the key for me. They have to have enough pick aggression and sustain, not just quick and super short ones. Gotta have that whole dynamic range for palm mutes heh.

I would be very interested to see your track so please post the YT link

[zircon]

FYI, we will be providing "S2 style" defaults in an upcoming S3 update; even though S3 can be exactly configured to behave as the S2 engine did, the defaults are different *now* because we wanted to cater to a wider range of playing. But I recognize that some people just want something that plays exactly as S2 did out-of-the-box with no tweaking, so that's what we'll provide.

Of course you can easily change this now. It's about 2 clicks to switch to the "Metal Rhythm" patch (which matches the mute settings in the S2 versions exactly) and a couple more clicks to set the mapping to use velocity switched sustain/mutes instead of keyswitched. Once you do that once (takes less than a minute total) you can save your snapshot or NKI and then never do it again.

I encourage anyone to take just a little time to set up S3 the way they want because it's so much more powerful than the S2 engine in so many ways (and it sounds WAY better for leads, chords, etc due to the better voicing system.) Hydra will benefit from all of this!

[ediblepolecat]

Hi Zircon,

Thanks for the update!

I've just bought S3 Legacy so I'm definitely not hating on the engine (I'm a big fan). I do like it and yes, chords and leads are significantly better. I just find S2 a little more 'instant gratification' than S3 for the palm mutes and riffs, that's all.

*Edit*
Thanks for the heads up on the snapshot!

All the best and I look forward to the update

[ediblepolecat]

Hey Claw11


https://youtu.be/xBIHxZQ599M


Here's the link for the track. I layered Cabal 8 with Shreddage 3 for the most part but it can be heard quite prominently around halfway.

All the best

[claw11]

Thanks for the showcase, it sounds great
Nice use of virtual guitars too. Way better than what you typically hear when youtubing that kind of stuff.
Also, Zircon posted song made with Shreddage 3 Hydra on their impact soundworks portion of the forum so go check that out if you haven't already.

[pryzmusic]

We can provide detailed context on what missteps were involved with the transition from Shreddage 2 to Shreddage 3 regarding its response to riff programming, details about the internal processing, as well as how the available UI parameters are used to replicate the old Shreddage 2 sound (something we provided as presets, which understandably it seems people don't notice are available). However, I would prefer to do this in the ISW subforum, instead of a Cabal 8 thread. If anyone is interested, please post a thread in the ISW subforum restating your grievances and we'll provide information about the current state of things and some tidbits about our future plans.

[Alyctro]

It would be good but whenever i play it, it's very unapealing because it sounds like it has baked in flanger or phaser or chorus. I strongly think there's a chorus effect on it enabled somewhere. If it sounded dry it would be an awesome guitar but i have no idea how to fix this.